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Comment by oneloop | Hacker News Reader

I expect that article will see lots of improvement in the coming weeks/months.

Good. It's one of those bloody articles that requires a layman to read all of the attached articles, two or three links deep, to have any chance of understanding just the parts without mathematical formulae.

And before anyone accuses me of wanting to dumb down Wikipedia: yes, that's exactly what I want. Wikipedia should be written to a generalist audience, not by specialists for specialists.

edit: I can't say it any better than this article: https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/09/24/wikipedias-wr...

Physics is complex man, what did you expect. If you know nothing, you need to learn a lot in order to even understand their starting point.

And regarding wikipedia articles, there's two big design alternatives: for each article you either write into it all the necessary background, or instead link to the necessary background in different articles. I suspect that the modus operandi that wikipedia has chosen is that you should do the former for mainstream topics and the latter for niche topics.

Here's a complex biology article that contains a lot of technical terms and links, yet still manages to be readable to a general audience: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaf

I get the feeling that most math-involving Wikipedia pages are simply compound regurgitations of various textbooks.

> you need to learn a lot in order to even understand their starting point

This is kind of a cop-out. In the coming days there will be reams written on these laureates in the scientific press, much of which will be more enlightening, informative and contextually relevant than the dedicated encyclopaedia article.

> I get the feeling that most math-involving Wikipedia pages are simply compound regurgitations of various textbooks.

You are absolutely right, because writing quality original work takes effort, and writing quality original maths work takes 100x more effort.

> This is kind of a cop-out

Call it whatever you want, but the fact remains that some subjects are more complex than others. Complex matters take more effort to write about, and there's fewer people qualified to write about them. When these two factors come together, you see regurgitated stuff. If you think that everything is equally simple if you explain it the right way, you're sorely mistaken about the nature of reality.

All this reminds me that I shouldn't be spending my own effort on HN :D

He didn't really say nor imply it'd take an equal amount of effort.

I 100% agree about wikipedia and math/physics topics. They give the distinct impression that either 1) The person writing them does not understand the topic or 2) The people working on the topic are not doing anything connected to reality.

However, I must disagree with your claim that the scientific press will do better. As part of their coverage of the physiology prize they made up a new term "cell recycling" that will waste the readers time when they try to look up what it is about. As long as they are technically correct, the math wikipedia pages are at most useless.

Although even that Leaf article highlights some unfortunate Wikipedia tendencies such as the tendency to unnecessarily insert pseudo-academic jargon. Take the third sentence: "Foliage is a mass noun that refers to leaves collectively." With two footnotes even. This could easily have been worded as something along the lines of "Leaves are collectively referred to as foliage, as in "autumn foliage."

Except the former shows that "mass noun" is a thing. And indeed the phrase was a hyperlink to a fascinating page discussing the concept. Unfortunately, somebody took your criticism to heart and changed the page to your formulation

  https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Leaf&type=revision&diff=742673936&oldid=741796479

excising the hyperlink in the process.

Your phrasing would be better were Wikipedia not a hyperlinked encyclopedia. Because Wikipedia is a hyperlinked encyclopedia, it's perfectly acceptable and even preferable to use stilted phrasing when it benefits the concise exposition of related concepts.

In law school we were taught that it's preferable to use simple English phrasing--so-called plain language--in legal writing, and to avoid terms of art. But look at what that has wrought in reality--legal instruments that are dozens of page longer than necessary, more often than not with dictionaries prepended. They're more inscrutable than ever, and arguably more difficult to approach for both layman and jurist.

Archaic legal writing relied heavily on terms of art. Terms of art, IMHO, provided many benefits, including 1) concision, 2) consistency, and 3) signaling. Concision because terms of art are a way to reference more complex concepts that you don't need to spell out. Consistency because widespread use of terms of art meant that there was only one way to say something; if you used other phrasing it was presumed you meant something different than what was meant by a related term of art. And signaling because using a term of art made it clear and obvious you were referring to some concrete legal concept, even if the reader wasn't familiar with it.

Notably the shift to "plain language" legal writing did not in the least change expectations in the legal community regarding the consistency and signaling aspects of legal language. Today, instead of using terms of art, lawyers literally copy+paste whole blocks of long-winded clauses.

IMO, all three of those aspects--concision, consistency, and signaling--should likewise be emphasized in an encyclopedic text, _especially_ in the context of hyperlinked text.

Different contexts require using language differently. You wouldn't criticize a musician for using a different style of prose, right? It's not just the medium that dictates how we phrase things, but the context and function of the communication.

>In the coming days there will be reams written on these laureates in the scientific press, much of which will be more enlightening, informative and contextually relevant than the dedicated encyclopaedia article.

In my experience, the scientific press usually does not know what they are talking about, and relying on them for enlightenment or information is dangerous.

I think the main issue here is not so much in choosing between including every prerequisite in every page or not, but in adding a meta-level of information that allows people to consume the prerequisites more easily.

When you open a Wikipedia article about a complex subject, it's expected that you're going to do a lot of background reading.

The problem is that you start surfing Wikipedia with a BFS/DFS approach, when it would be a lot more efficient if the articles were organized more systematically to lead to a gradual understanding of the subject.

> Wikipedia should be written to a generalist audience, not by specialists for specialists.

Until this has been done (feel free to help), I prefer that the specialists view is in place, rather than nothing. Or worse, a tabloid one sentence placeholder.

Exactly. And furthermore, the more niche and complex a topic is, the smaller the pool of people qualified to massage a specialist topic into a generalist audience.

>It's one of those bloody articles that requires a layman to read all of the attached articles

I don't see why this is a bad thing. I often do this for fun, and when I do it's never information I need to get on in my day to day life. These are extremely complex topics. If you don't want to understand them in their complete complexity, do you really want to understand them at all? What's the point of dumbing down a subject for the layman if the subject can't really be understood at that dumbness level?

The problem is that there's no way to know whether your search process is going to terminate in a path from what you understand to what you don't understand, or if it's just going to wander around in specialist subjects, each referencing each other, with no obvious way back down to non-specialist topics. Or, potentially, no way at all. For all you know the "explanatory links" on a given specialist topic actually point to topics that are yet more specialist.

My dream someday is to see these things organized into a "lattice", where links are clearly labeled as going "down" or "up" the lattice and you can have a clue what's going on.

Something not entirely quite unlike this http://matpalm.com/blog/2011/08/13/wikipedia-philosophy/

I disagree. With anything technical, there's going to be many ways to explain it, and the best way depends on the audience. I don't think every article should be written for the same audience. Some pages will likely be visited by all sorts of people, and some only by experts. If you're writing for experts and don't assume they already know a bunch of things, it's going to be many times less concise and clear than it should be. You would have to repeat fundamental math and physics education on every page like this one if you wanted to explain to a general audience.

An article like "Kosterlitz–Thouless transition" is not even being seen by a general audience anyways, except for when some news-worthy event like this happens, so why write like it's being read by someone it's not? It's not like writing this stuff is easy.

Not every topic can practically be reduced to a layman-friendly explanation.

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